Advances in data capture, storage, and communication technologies have made vast amounts of multimedia data available to private and commercial customers. In addition, advances in processing power and increases in communication bandwidth have made the sharing of multimedia data more practical and prevalent. There are a number of computer software applications, such as media player software applications, that provide consumers easy access to multimedia data such as videos and music. Other computer software applications such as electronic mail (e-mail), instant messaging, and data download software applications also facilitate communication and sharing of multimedia data. Because of the above-mentioned advances, sharing of multimedia data via communication networks has become prolific.
In addition to non-commercial multimedia data such as amateur and personal videos, commercial multimedia data such as movies and television series are increasingly available. Because much multimedia data, such as movies and television series, are subject to copyright and/or other protection, the sharing of such data may be governed by digital rights management (“DRM”) policies. Even for the permissible sharing of multimedia data, a user often faces cumbersome procedures. For example, if a user wants to share a segment of a multimedia program, the user may have to save the multimedia program locally on his computer, launch another software application program to edit and store a desired segment of the multimedia program, use yet another program such as e-mail for communication, attach the stored data segment to an e-mail and send the data segment to a desired destination.